Post by anne12 on Mar 28, 2022 1:32:38 GMT
The way forward - how do you heal your avoidant attatchment style/attatchmnet traits:
Discover and experience that the world is (relative) safe and friendly
Discover that you belong
Join your life instead of observing it. Take the driver's seat!
Allow your vulnerability to have wishes and needs in relation to other people
Develop your empathy for your own and others' needs, wishes, desires, dreams, feelings, etc. Practice feeling your body and your passion
Practice talking about your inner thoughts, needs and feelings - to share with your loved ones
Develop your trust that there is support from other people. Practice reaching out and asking for this
Practice appreciating your relationships and other people
If you walk away, get back to your partner quickly and repair
Go into therapy to experience another human being supporting you and helping you with all the old scares and rejections
Practise joint attention activities - go for a walk side by side with a friend, your partner ect.
Practise approching other people
Work with a therapist to help you to be better, at reading facial expression in others and social cues.
When you have to leave, tell the person when you are coming back.
Your most important key to more love is that dare to reach out for it. Opposite the ambivalent and disorganized attatched, you are the master of coping with yourself. The ability (created as a defense against the lack of presence and attention) is your greatest strength, but also the greatest enemy of love and presence. The way to more love is to open your heart and dare to show vulnerability. Show that you like everyone else need to love and be loved.
You already have the ability to love. It should not be learned. The development and learning lies in restoring the contact to your heart. You can achieve that through different techniques Techniques as ex. visualization exercises, home assignments and sound exercises that calms the nervous systems and support your way back to love.
Practise beeing precent:
Indulge yourself by showing your body and heart care. You can do it with a spa day, relaxing massage, freshly squeezed juice, healthy diet, meditation, fun music, good night's sleep, breathing exercises, fun with friends and nature experiences. The purpose is to do everything with presence and attention. Then you can get more in touch with yourself, and your need for presence and love.
Focus on the good:
You already have good things in your life. Practice focusing on it. Maybe you have a good job, good friends, colleagues, partner, good health , a nice home. If you think 'No, there's nothing good in my life right now' then focus on 'something' you really care about. It may be nature, a hobby, your pet that you are / has been closely tied to. In short, your thoughts make your reality. For the simple reason, focus on the good and nutritious, rather than the negative and draining.
(An attatchment/SE/gestalt therapist)
Remember, when we are doing deep work, the most challeging thing is, that we are often expecting to wake up in the livingroom with mom and dad. We have to make a reality test to find out that there are other people in the world, who are friendly and caring.
(Diane Poole Heller)
Help to get from your head to your feelings and your body:
- yoga
- massage
- showers where you concetrate on feeling the water on your skin
- activating your 5 sences - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/12835/
- mindfulness
- self- and co-regulating exercises
- bodywork
- dance (with or without a partner)
- practise joint attention activities - go for a walk side by side with a friend, your partner ect.
(An attatchment/SE/love/gestalt therapist/teacher)
More work exercises:
Working with the mental fundament
Do visionwalks - jebkinnisonforum.com/thread/3328/visionwalk
Working with visions with a therapist/alone
Body awareness and feeling sensations in the body
Deciding that you want to bee in this world
Activating the social engagement system tips - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/38568/
Eye contact (remember looking away and then look again is natural)
Hugs (not as threatening as eyecontact) - welcome home exercise - youtu.be/V9FBdC2Kykg
The power of touch - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/13028/
Remember people who have been supportive. Use the coming into secure exercise.
Coming into secure attatchment exersice: (all attatchment styles)
• Think of a person whom you may or could have counted on. One, as you have or have had a positive relationship with. It may be in less time. Or just the person at the counter in the supermarket, who smiled kindly to you. If you can not think of any person, then Think of an animal ... or maybe nature or something spiritual
• Feel the love, the warmth, the support, the care, the presence, the friendliness or whatever is positive in this regard
• Notice what mood it gives you
• Notice in your body what feelings it gives in the body. Typical sensations are: Warmth, calm, weight, relaxation, ease, space, joy, the trimblings, champagne bubbles ect. But there may also be excitement, fear, lack, longing, sadness, sorrow or even anger. Give it permission and accept these feelings / sensations and give them love / warmth / care if you can
• Repeat this activity several times a day
(Diane Poole Heller)
Titratiion/pendulation (SE):
To help the avoidant to Get from their head to their body a se/attatchment therapist Can use titrating where the therapist talks to the cognotive part of the persons brain and Then helps the person to go down in the Body for a short While and Then Up in the head again. The technique is from SE .
Also pendulation Can Be a good tool. Also a SE technique. The therapist Can also use touch, But in the beginning the avoidant would think That IT is weird to Be touched
(SE/attatchment/gestalt/couple therapist)
Dan Siegel - how to work with the two hermophires:
youtu.be/xPjhfUVgvOQ
Diane Poole Heller suggests:
- Kind Eyes – For Attachment Gaze - www.youtube.com/watch?v=leVxB1l5NiY
- Welcome to the World – to be met and celebrated
Specific Corrective Experiences that can help break the grip of a wounded past and bring other people back into the Avoidantly-attached person’s life in nourishing ways.
These Corrective Experiences include the Kind Eyes Exercise that involves a person looking out into the world into the kind, loving eyes of someone looking back at them.
In this exercise, you imagine someone lighting up when they open their door and see you. You take that image and feel “into” your eyes and allow your eyes to reach out to that joy you see in the other person’s eyes.
Sounds nice, right? But this exercise requires a tremendous amount of trust and the overcoming of intense fear as an Avoidantly- attached person takes the huge risk of “looking again” after years of blinding themselves to contact, especially in their eyes.
When successful, this exercise helps to restore healthy contact and reduces the defenses and/or disconnection in the eyes.
The disconnection or dissociation can become a pattern from meeting too much hostility or vacancy as a child. This exercise accesses the original attachment gaze and gives it support, and perhaps emotional limbic nourishment as well, and exposes the original wound. We work with the attachment gaze to give it time to heal, discharge emotion, overarousal and the original distress. Often the eyes have stopped “seeing” in terms of actual contact. Safety in contact has to be restored to resurrect the possibility of deeper connection and for the client to literally see a new in a way based on the reality of today.
"Imagine you are looking out into the world and seeing kind eyes looking back at you. Perhaps you remember a time you showed up unexpected at a friend’s door, and they opened the door truly delighted to see YOU!
What happens in and around your eyes, your body, your emotional state? This guy, the Dalai Lama, has been through tons of trauma! But he’s definitely hooked up to a social engagement. You can see the contact in his face and the kindness in his eyes.
You might think about the people you’ve talked about that reminded you of secure attachment. Take a moment to close your eyes. Keep tracking what happens in your body, and specifically your face and your actual eyeball.
Imagine and if it helps to look at the Dalai Lama, you can open your eyes and use that imagine looking out into the world as a baby or a young child, and seeing someone (could be an animal, too) looking back at you with loving, kind, caring eyes.
Let’s take a moment to see if any person, or pet, or situation comes up. Sometimes it’s nature, but see if you can bring in actual eye contact from some source.
Notice what happens in your body, your emotional sense, your thoughts, and let your eyes move out to their eyes. Let yourself register their kindness, their caring, their love.
Take a moment to see if you can see that, take it in, and bring it back into your body, back into your eye, while you are maintaining an awareness of how it’s affecting you. It might be one person, it might be more animals and people anything that helps you connect to that loving kindness and passionate, caring presence that you can see in the eyes.
Another example might be stopping by a friend’s house when they don’t know you’re coming. You ring the doorbell and they answer the door, and they open the door and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s you! How wonderful to see you!” And you feel, as they are saying that, that you surprised them, but you feel authenticity in the fact that they are really glad you are there; they are really happy and delighted that it’s you at the door. They look at you with that “you are special to me” gleam beam truly, deeply welcomed.
Just notice. This might bring up a wound, or it might bring up pleasure. There are all sorts of possibilities, and there’s no incorrect response. We are just looking for awareness of what was it like for you in eye gaze. What do you expect in eye gaze? What happens when you see positive caring, nurturing, “you are special to me,” “I love you,” being communicated through the eyes?
Take a moment to feel what’s arising. Whatever is there is fine. You can track your emotions or thoughts, the sensations, images, the body’s reaction, the nervous system. And when you find an okay place to land, give yourself a moment to transition into opening your eyes when you are ready!"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=leVxB1l5NiY
Stephen Porges - polyvagel theory
And the social.engagement system:
youtu.be/lxS3bv32-UY
Interactive regulation connection exercise - rocking the attatchmentsystem - youtu.be/EoAqXh8hOZ4
Welcome to the World Exercise
is another highly effective Corrective Experience exercise for repairing Avoidant attachment.
In this exercise, clients create their version of a perfect, well-celebrated welcome of themselves as a unique being with very special contributions to make to the world.
The fulfilling and “full-feeling” experience communicated by the therapist (or other) and received by the client (or person) is: “We are so glad you are here. We have been waiting for you. I celebrate you and your very existence. You have the birthright to exist. I want to be in real contact with you. I welcome you. You belong here. We want you here!”
This Welcome to the World Corrective Experience helps clients regain the sense of their existence being celebrated. Instead of having one foot on the planet and one foot off— as if they have never committed to arriving here in the first place—they can land on their feet in a more connected, embodied, grounded way. Now the life force and brilliancy predominantly residing in their heads, including their often extraordinary intelligence, can more fully inhabit their physicality and beingness.
PS: The kind eyes exersice can also be used by FA/disorganised attatchment style.
Because it is difficut for the avoidant to feel the body, they can "ground" throw their eyes.
(Diane Poole Heller)
How to Ground and soften the eyes:
Eyeball exercise (good for avoidant and desorganised attatched):
Letting the eyeballs sink into the eyes and imagine that the eyeballs lands on a soft pillow (avoidants and desorganized - they can have a "harsh/starring look" in their eyes, because they can be watching out for "danger-signales").
Also a good way to gruond, because they can have a hard time feeling the body and if/or/when they feel the body, they can somehow get activated)
(Diane Poole Heller)
Working with the facial mussels, can also help to loosen up the face and make the face look more friendly and welcoming to other people. And it can help the person to be able to better regoise their feelings
(An SE, bodyworker, fitness trainer, stress coach)
Discover and experience that the world is (relative) safe and friendly
Discover that you belong
Join your life instead of observing it. Take the driver's seat!
Allow your vulnerability to have wishes and needs in relation to other people
Develop your empathy for your own and others' needs, wishes, desires, dreams, feelings, etc. Practice feeling your body and your passion
Practice talking about your inner thoughts, needs and feelings - to share with your loved ones
Develop your trust that there is support from other people. Practice reaching out and asking for this
Practice appreciating your relationships and other people
If you walk away, get back to your partner quickly and repair
Go into therapy to experience another human being supporting you and helping you with all the old scares and rejections
Practise joint attention activities - go for a walk side by side with a friend, your partner ect.
Practise approching other people
Work with a therapist to help you to be better, at reading facial expression in others and social cues.
When you have to leave, tell the person when you are coming back.
Your most important key to more love is that dare to reach out for it. Opposite the ambivalent and disorganized attatched, you are the master of coping with yourself. The ability (created as a defense against the lack of presence and attention) is your greatest strength, but also the greatest enemy of love and presence. The way to more love is to open your heart and dare to show vulnerability. Show that you like everyone else need to love and be loved.
You already have the ability to love. It should not be learned. The development and learning lies in restoring the contact to your heart. You can achieve that through different techniques Techniques as ex. visualization exercises, home assignments and sound exercises that calms the nervous systems and support your way back to love.
Practise beeing precent:
Indulge yourself by showing your body and heart care. You can do it with a spa day, relaxing massage, freshly squeezed juice, healthy diet, meditation, fun music, good night's sleep, breathing exercises, fun with friends and nature experiences. The purpose is to do everything with presence and attention. Then you can get more in touch with yourself, and your need for presence and love.
Focus on the good:
You already have good things in your life. Practice focusing on it. Maybe you have a good job, good friends, colleagues, partner, good health , a nice home. If you think 'No, there's nothing good in my life right now' then focus on 'something' you really care about. It may be nature, a hobby, your pet that you are / has been closely tied to. In short, your thoughts make your reality. For the simple reason, focus on the good and nutritious, rather than the negative and draining.
(An attatchment/SE/gestalt therapist)
Remember, when we are doing deep work, the most challeging thing is, that we are often expecting to wake up in the livingroom with mom and dad. We have to make a reality test to find out that there are other people in the world, who are friendly and caring.
(Diane Poole Heller)
Help to get from your head to your feelings and your body:
- yoga
- massage
- showers where you concetrate on feeling the water on your skin
- activating your 5 sences - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/12835/
- mindfulness
- self- and co-regulating exercises
- bodywork
- dance (with or without a partner)
- practise joint attention activities - go for a walk side by side with a friend, your partner ect.
(An attatchment/SE/love/gestalt therapist/teacher)
More work exercises:
Working with the mental fundament
Do visionwalks - jebkinnisonforum.com/thread/3328/visionwalk
Working with visions with a therapist/alone
Body awareness and feeling sensations in the body
Deciding that you want to bee in this world
Activating the social engagement system tips - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/38568/
Eye contact (remember looking away and then look again is natural)
Hugs (not as threatening as eyecontact) - welcome home exercise - youtu.be/V9FBdC2Kykg
The power of touch - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/13028/
Remember people who have been supportive. Use the coming into secure exercise.
Coming into secure attatchment exersice: (all attatchment styles)
• Think of a person whom you may or could have counted on. One, as you have or have had a positive relationship with. It may be in less time. Or just the person at the counter in the supermarket, who smiled kindly to you. If you can not think of any person, then Think of an animal ... or maybe nature or something spiritual
• Feel the love, the warmth, the support, the care, the presence, the friendliness or whatever is positive in this regard
• Notice what mood it gives you
• Notice in your body what feelings it gives in the body. Typical sensations are: Warmth, calm, weight, relaxation, ease, space, joy, the trimblings, champagne bubbles ect. But there may also be excitement, fear, lack, longing, sadness, sorrow or even anger. Give it permission and accept these feelings / sensations and give them love / warmth / care if you can
• Repeat this activity several times a day
(Diane Poole Heller)
Titratiion/pendulation (SE):
To help the avoidant to Get from their head to their body a se/attatchment therapist Can use titrating where the therapist talks to the cognotive part of the persons brain and Then helps the person to go down in the Body for a short While and Then Up in the head again. The technique is from SE .
Also pendulation Can Be a good tool. Also a SE technique. The therapist Can also use touch, But in the beginning the avoidant would think That IT is weird to Be touched
(SE/attatchment/gestalt/couple therapist)
Dan Siegel - how to work with the two hermophires:
youtu.be/xPjhfUVgvOQ
Diane Poole Heller suggests:
- Kind Eyes – For Attachment Gaze - www.youtube.com/watch?v=leVxB1l5NiY
- Welcome to the World – to be met and celebrated
Specific Corrective Experiences that can help break the grip of a wounded past and bring other people back into the Avoidantly-attached person’s life in nourishing ways.
These Corrective Experiences include the Kind Eyes Exercise that involves a person looking out into the world into the kind, loving eyes of someone looking back at them.
In this exercise, you imagine someone lighting up when they open their door and see you. You take that image and feel “into” your eyes and allow your eyes to reach out to that joy you see in the other person’s eyes.
Sounds nice, right? But this exercise requires a tremendous amount of trust and the overcoming of intense fear as an Avoidantly- attached person takes the huge risk of “looking again” after years of blinding themselves to contact, especially in their eyes.
When successful, this exercise helps to restore healthy contact and reduces the defenses and/or disconnection in the eyes.
The disconnection or dissociation can become a pattern from meeting too much hostility or vacancy as a child. This exercise accesses the original attachment gaze and gives it support, and perhaps emotional limbic nourishment as well, and exposes the original wound. We work with the attachment gaze to give it time to heal, discharge emotion, overarousal and the original distress. Often the eyes have stopped “seeing” in terms of actual contact. Safety in contact has to be restored to resurrect the possibility of deeper connection and for the client to literally see a new in a way based on the reality of today.
"Imagine you are looking out into the world and seeing kind eyes looking back at you. Perhaps you remember a time you showed up unexpected at a friend’s door, and they opened the door truly delighted to see YOU!
What happens in and around your eyes, your body, your emotional state? This guy, the Dalai Lama, has been through tons of trauma! But he’s definitely hooked up to a social engagement. You can see the contact in his face and the kindness in his eyes.
You might think about the people you’ve talked about that reminded you of secure attachment. Take a moment to close your eyes. Keep tracking what happens in your body, and specifically your face and your actual eyeball.
Imagine and if it helps to look at the Dalai Lama, you can open your eyes and use that imagine looking out into the world as a baby or a young child, and seeing someone (could be an animal, too) looking back at you with loving, kind, caring eyes.
Let’s take a moment to see if any person, or pet, or situation comes up. Sometimes it’s nature, but see if you can bring in actual eye contact from some source.
Notice what happens in your body, your emotional sense, your thoughts, and let your eyes move out to their eyes. Let yourself register their kindness, their caring, their love.
Take a moment to see if you can see that, take it in, and bring it back into your body, back into your eye, while you are maintaining an awareness of how it’s affecting you. It might be one person, it might be more animals and people anything that helps you connect to that loving kindness and passionate, caring presence that you can see in the eyes.
Another example might be stopping by a friend’s house when they don’t know you’re coming. You ring the doorbell and they answer the door, and they open the door and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s you! How wonderful to see you!” And you feel, as they are saying that, that you surprised them, but you feel authenticity in the fact that they are really glad you are there; they are really happy and delighted that it’s you at the door. They look at you with that “you are special to me” gleam beam truly, deeply welcomed.
Just notice. This might bring up a wound, or it might bring up pleasure. There are all sorts of possibilities, and there’s no incorrect response. We are just looking for awareness of what was it like for you in eye gaze. What do you expect in eye gaze? What happens when you see positive caring, nurturing, “you are special to me,” “I love you,” being communicated through the eyes?
Take a moment to feel what’s arising. Whatever is there is fine. You can track your emotions or thoughts, the sensations, images, the body’s reaction, the nervous system. And when you find an okay place to land, give yourself a moment to transition into opening your eyes when you are ready!"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=leVxB1l5NiY
Stephen Porges - polyvagel theory
And the social.engagement system:
youtu.be/lxS3bv32-UY
Interactive regulation connection exercise - rocking the attatchmentsystem - youtu.be/EoAqXh8hOZ4
Welcome to the World Exercise
is another highly effective Corrective Experience exercise for repairing Avoidant attachment.
In this exercise, clients create their version of a perfect, well-celebrated welcome of themselves as a unique being with very special contributions to make to the world.
The fulfilling and “full-feeling” experience communicated by the therapist (or other) and received by the client (or person) is: “We are so glad you are here. We have been waiting for you. I celebrate you and your very existence. You have the birthright to exist. I want to be in real contact with you. I welcome you. You belong here. We want you here!”
This Welcome to the World Corrective Experience helps clients regain the sense of their existence being celebrated. Instead of having one foot on the planet and one foot off— as if they have never committed to arriving here in the first place—they can land on their feet in a more connected, embodied, grounded way. Now the life force and brilliancy predominantly residing in their heads, including their often extraordinary intelligence, can more fully inhabit their physicality and beingness.
PS: The kind eyes exersice can also be used by FA/disorganised attatchment style.
Because it is difficut for the avoidant to feel the body, they can "ground" throw their eyes.
(Diane Poole Heller)
How to Ground and soften the eyes:
Eyeball exercise (good for avoidant and desorganised attatched):
Letting the eyeballs sink into the eyes and imagine that the eyeballs lands on a soft pillow (avoidants and desorganized - they can have a "harsh/starring look" in their eyes, because they can be watching out for "danger-signales").
Also a good way to gruond, because they can have a hard time feeling the body and if/or/when they feel the body, they can somehow get activated)
(Diane Poole Heller)
Working with the facial mussels, can also help to loosen up the face and make the face look more friendly and welcoming to other people. And it can help the person to be able to better regoise their feelings
(An SE, bodyworker, fitness trainer, stress coach)
